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SPSP 2018

People are living longer than ever. For many countries, average life expectancy is predicted to soon exceed 80 years. As a longevity expert put it, “We should be planning for more life.” And of course, this includes maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Adolescence is a time full of transitional periods and growth. Generally, as we age we become more mature and stable. We experience life events that allow us to successfully fulfill our adulthood roles.

However, the life events we experience are not always positive. With over 70,000 youth incarcerated in the U.S. yearly, we cannot deny the depth of impact such a negative life event may create.

“You made it!” Applause spread across the room to congratulate the people who had recently accepted their first faculty position at a university. To shed some light on what comes next for these soon-to-be junior faculty members, a diverse panel of early career professors spoke about their pre-tenure experiences. Drs. Shantal Marshall, Lindsey Rodriguez, Justin Troisi, and Jackie Chen represented schools that vary in size, demographics, location, and expectations. They shared how teaching, service, and research each have played a role in their progress toward tenure.

“Okay, so that’s our world,” said Alice Eagly, The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) 2018 Annual Convention Legacy honoree, as she explained the broad differences in the division of labor across men and women that persist to this day. Eagly is perhaps best known for her work on how gender stereotypes emerge from the social roles men and women adopt. As Eagly explained, we learn about men and women from how labor is divided.

Holding a sign she couldn’t read, Megan Phelps-Roper stood at her first picket line at age 5, and for the next twenty years joined her Westboro Baptist Church family in spreading hate against groups from Catholics to Muslims to LGBT people. To most people, what Phelps-Roper did sounds biased, and it can be tempting to think of her as a irredeemable.

Despite the fact that most academics’ careers (or professional lives) depend on writing and publishing prolifically, many new faculty would rather do almost anything but write. Natalie Sabik, who researches social identity and health, and has created a writing accountability group, jokes that some days she would rather fold laundry than start writing.

In 1931, James Truslow Adams defined the American dream as the idea that “each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” At present, however, social mobility is remarkably stagnant, with one’s circumstances of birth having a large effect on later social class. Despite this fact, many people overestimate social mobility.